jmacnaughtan
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Posts posted by jmacnaughtan
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On 6/18/2018 at 12:14 AM, pastrygirl said:
@ElsieD that's so cool that you just happened to find them out in the wild! And that @liuzhou ate them as a child; I knew someone here would have heard of them
The only other pastry that I think of as Scottish is shortbread, also heavy on the butter... I guess they must have some good butter over there
I've never been to the UK, will have to see for myself someday.
If you haven't had a Scottish potato scone, you're missing out
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I like doing it Meunière style, dipping one side in flour then frying in a load of butter. The only difficulty is accurately judging when it is done.
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I dice them, microwave them and toss with olive oil, garlic thyme, salt, pepper and chopped tomatoes. Put them in a baking dish and bake slowly at a low temperature until it confits.
Then top with breadcrumbs, toast in a hot oven until crisp and serve. Works great with beef, veal and pork.
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Have you though of making nougat? No need to peel the nuts
If I remember correctly, there's a good recipe in Greweling's book.
You could also use them for frangipane, dacquoise, macarons, etc. I wouldn't bother skinning them; the skins add colour and a slightly deeper flavour.
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12 hours ago, chromedome said:
They've historically been a hugely important foodstuff, though as Rob says they take a deal of preparation. Oak trees generate a greater weight of edible nuts than just about any other tree, though, so in a subsistence economy they're worth the trouble. They were the staple food of the native peoples in one part of California, and even in Europe they've been a "famine food" off and on for most of history.
That's really interesting. I had no idea they were used for anything other than feeding pigs.
It seems like they were used in much the same way as chestnuts in the Jura and east of France - where you can't grow wheat, you get your starch from the trees. It's a shame that they don't offer much in terms of an interesting or unique flavour though.
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18 hours ago, gfron1 said:
That's exactly what it is. I make a living off of serving that stuff
Old CW: throw your acorns (shelled) in a sack in the river and wash the tannins for about a week.
Less old CW: throw your acorns in a sack in the toilet tank and wash the tannins for a few days.
New CW: Open hotel pan acorns covered in water in chamber sealer and wash the tannins for a few minutes.
That's pretty cool. What do they taste like?
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No piping, though? With two miles, you could write a proper birthday message for a change.
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On 14/05/2018 at 10:36 PM, gfron1 said:
I don't often get to post my fun work since I'm usually in production mode, but I really enjoyed this dessert I made for a foraged food dinner in Napa recently. Acorn daquoise, prickly pear sorbet, torched Italian meringue, black currant pate de fruit, fresh mango, candied prickly pear.
A really lovely looking dessert...
But please enlighten me: is an acorn dacquoise what I think it is? A normal dacquoise, made with ground acorns?
I had no idea they were even edible.
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I'm currently working on making a decent chocolate orange cake, so here's the first try:
Chocolate orange cake
Medovik biscuit
Orange confit
Tanzanie 75% ganache
Orange curd
Chocolate crumbs
Chocolate chantilly
Candied orange
It's OK, but the chocolate chantilly started to split at the last minute
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If it's anything like the pork jowls I've seen, it's going to be about 90% fat. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable serving a slice of that, even SV and crisped.
I'd dice it and use it in pasta sauces.
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3 hours ago, cdh said:
This conversation just brought to mind a thought-- now that we live in a world with such technological wonders as juicers in it, is there a point to making vegetable stock, when instead, you could weigh out 2:1:1 onions, carrots, celery and a sprig of parsley and run them through the juicer? If the aromatic flavors are the objective, why not have an ice cube tray of aromatics juice to use on demand? I should do the experiment myself... but has anybody thought along these lines and done any investigation in that direction? Juice, clarify, freeze, drop into recipes as needed?
You could do, but I'd be loathe to add raw onion juice to a sauce in place of a stock. I have a feeling that it would remain very harsh, even with further simmering.
And there would also be the issue of everything in your freezer being potentially tainted by the aroma of raw onion while it freezes.
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On 01/04/2018 at 11:29 PM, Kerry Beal said:
Hot Cross Bread
That is excellent. Please tell me it had the same, pleasantly stodgy/chewy crumb you get in the small, shop-bought ones.
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3 hours ago, gfron1 said:
I always love your work and if I lived nearby would be enjoying far too many of your creations.
Thanks. What a wonderful thing to hear
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8 hours ago, cakewalk said:
Thank you. That does sound intense. It also sounds very do-able. (Which makes me happy.) But how did you use it in this cake? Do you spread a thin layer on the crust and then a layer of lemon curd, topped with meringue? Did you mix some confit into the lemon curd? Sorry if I'm being too nosy. This really caught me. (I love lemon.)
No problem. Here, I spread a thin layer on the pastry case, then put the lemon curd over the top. You could mix it into the curd itself, but I prefer my curds to be completely smooth
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5 hours ago, cakewalk said:
@jmacnaughtan please tell me about your lemon confit and how you incorporate it into that lovely dessert. I never heard of lemon confit before so I Googled it. The recipes I found seem to vary from preserved lemons (with just a bit of sugar added to the salt) to lemons steeped in olive oil rather than salt. They all look great (I was particularly drawn to the recipe in Saveur), but how did you use yours in that dessert? Which version of confit did you use, salt or oil? (Or something else?) It must add a very interesting flavor element to the sweetness of the lemon curd and the meringue.
It's not a confit in the traditional sense, more like the French confiture - but much more intense. Essentially, you zest a couple of lemons and juice them, and add half the weight of the juice in sugar. You then reduce that down slowly until it takes on a jam-like consistency. (The original recipe from Conticini says to peel off the strips of zest, blanch them three times and blitz the confit, but I skip that and just microplane the lemons and it works perfectly well).
It's an incredibly intense lemon flavour with lots of acidity and almost zero sweetness, so you have to be careful how much you use.
I've tried it successfully with grapefruit as well, and less so with oranges - they tend to go extremely sticky. If I tried it again with them, I'd cut down the sugar by half. Let me know if you give it a go
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I've come to the realisation that I prefer meringue to be unbrowned and brilliant white. Somehow, the caramel/Maillard notes just don't seem to work as well, especially with fruit.
I have a sneaking suspicion that browning meringues isn't about flavour or presentation. I believe, deep down, that pastry cooks just really like playing with blowtorches.
So here it is, an unashamedly white lemon meringue tart
Pâte sucrée
Lemon confit
Lemon curd
Italian meringue
Candied citron
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6 minutes ago, Anna N said:
Hell I couldn’t even make a decent poundcake to execute my suggested recipe. You are both overrating my capabilities exponentially.
Looks pretty good to me. Although there are not many pound cakes I'd kick out of bed, to be honest.
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On 17/03/2018 at 7:24 PM, Tri2Cook said:
I'd strongly question it being beyond your capabilities.True - none of the constituent parts are particularly difficult to make. You just need the time to do each one properly
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I made an orange cake for dessert this evening. Fairly straightforward, just orange and almond/hazelnut.
Orange cake
Orange and almond financier
Orange marmelade
Hazelnut and Golden Grahams crunch
Orange curd
Orange and golden syrup chantilly
Glaze
Candied orange
For some reason, I've recently had an aversion to cakes with flat, smooth, regular tops. Not entirely sure why.
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22 minutes ago, Lisa Shock said:
Honestly, most of those pies in the video are raw. They won't look as precise if baked, and they certainly won't be as colorful. There are a bunch of people posting this sort of thing on Pinterest and people try to copy it and get very disappointed when their baked final product does not look or taste as good. Real pie crust, if it's going to be flaky, is going to rise and shift in the oven.
I really dislike cooked apple/pear/plum/peach/etc skins in pie. To me the texture is like strips of plastic. All of those cute looking raw pies will bake up into pies with terrible interior textures.
Overall, I find it really unrealistic and in many cases inedible.
True, that. There are easier ways to make attractive desserts, which don't require long hours cutting and crimping pastry.
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I was asked to do a proper French dinner, so I made a Paris Brest for dessert. Unfortunately, it was only after I'd made the cream that I realised my praliné was old and had developed that health-food-peanut-butter flavour.
So it went in the bin, and I made a coffee cream. Being clever, I swapped out the sugar for black treacle which is nowhere near as sweet, and didn't change the amount.
In despair, I reached for the nearest sweet thing I could add to the cake to make it taste like a dessert: fig jam.
Who knew that coffee and fig worked?
I had some choux pastry, cream and jam left over, so I made éclairs too. Which tasted the same.
And yeah, I've given up trying to make choux pastry look elegant.
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54 minutes ago, Kerry Beal said:
It's kind of a cheesecake I'd say. A bit wetter and less lofty than I had hoped.
Eggs, sugar, ricotta and booze - I guess lofty might be dreaming
Hmmm. Maybe whipping the egg whites separately could help with that.
Or the usual: more booze.
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4 hours ago, Kerry Beal said:
Anna and I found a Corsican cookbook in Homesense yesterday - I took a pic of this recipe when couldn't read it when I got home. So had to go back and buy the book.
That looks good, and like something I would eat far too much of. But... what is it? Is it a flan? A set custard? A horrendously failed sponge cake?
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11 minutes ago, lesliec said:
Shoot, you guys are really rifling your punsacks!
I know. I normally recoil from scraping the bottom of the barrel like this, but I've had a thread like this in my sights for a while.
Have you ever had a buttery?
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
They do have them in Ireland, but I think they're called farls over there.